Academic Interests

PhD Project

"The Modulor 1941-1948: Strategies and contradictions in Le Corbusier’s professional and aesthetic agenda after WWII"

Summary

The PhD research project discusses the Modulor, a measuring tool based upon an idealized human stature of 1,83 m and two series of Fibonacci numbers, launched by Le Corbusier after WWII, basically through two publications: Le Modulor (1950) and Modulor 2 (1955). The PhD research aims to deconstruct the mythopoetic narratives provided within the books written by Le Corbusier, and to present the several transformations of the system, since its first emergence during the Vichy years, until the writing of the first book in 1948. The project’s hypothesis is that the Modulor’s function as a standard or a proportional system is undermined by its idiosyncratic use as a controlling and corrective tool instead of an absolute canon. Furthermore, I propose that its interest does not lie in the integrity of the system but in the additive nature of the discourse around it: the visual symbolism, the historicist legitimization and the often delirious narrative which coincides with Le Corbusier’s strategic restaging as an ‘artist’ circa 1948.